The Way of Life: Contemplation | Psalm 27:4, Psalm 63:1-8
Brian Hedges | November 3, 2024
This morning I want to begin with a little game, if you will. We might call this “guess that theologian.” I want to read a quotation to you and not tell you who it’s from, and you guess in your mind. Who do you think said this? Who do you think wrote this? The quotation goes like this:
“Once, as I was in the woods in a retired place to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view that for me was extraordinary of the glory of the Son of God as mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure, and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension. This grace, that appeared to me so calm and sweet, appeared great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared excellent with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception. This continued, as near as I can judge, for about an hour, and kept me the bigger part of the time in a flood of tears and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be what I know not otherwise how to express—emptied—and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love, to trust in him, to live upon him, to serve and follow him, and to be totally wrapt up in the fullness of Christ and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity.”
That’s a moving quote. It’s a beautiful quote. It’s a somewhat emotional description of this person’s experience. I wonder who you think it was. If you know at all the literature of the mystics and the medieval theologians, you might think, “Oh, that sounds like Bernard of Clairveax, or it sounds like Francis of Assissi, or Teresa of Avila, or somebody like that.” But no, it’s not any of the medieval mystics. This is actually Jonathan Edwards, that New England Puritan, and a person that some people have called the greatest theologian in the American tradition. This is from Jonathan Edwards’ personal narrative as he reflected on his early experiences of time and solitude with God.
I use this quotation to begin because of how Edwards uses the language of contemplation to describe this encounter he had with God. We’re in a series right now—this is the third week in the series—called “The Way of Life: Vital Practices for Your Spiritual Journey.” We have seen that the way of Jesus is the way to life; not only to eternal life, but the way to a rich and satisfying life, what Jesus called abundant life in John 10:10. But it is a way that is marked out by certain spiritual practices.
The first week we looked at the practice of meditation, from the first psalm. Last week we talked about the practice of recollection from Psalm 86, and today we’re looking at the practice of contemplation. We’re going to be in two different psalms, Psalm 27 and Psalm 63.
Before we read those passages, let me begin with some qualifications for this message and really for this series as a whole. I just want to say here at the outset that I’m not a guru and should not be viewed as an expert on this. I don’t consider myself a master apprentice of Jesus, but rather a student who’s speaking to fellow students.
One of the reasons that we’re doing this series is because I need this series, because I need to grow in these practices. I’ve been spending more and more time in this kind of literature over the last several years, and again in this season, because I see my own need to grow in grace, to grow in likeness to Christ. I see my need to develop better these kinds of practices that will help me to live a flourishing and a vibrant Christian life.
Secondly, this series is not meant to be comprehensive. We’re really just taking six weeks to focus on six practices, but this is not nearly all of the practices. Really, in this series we’re only focusing on what we might call private and personal spiritual practices. But there’s another whole set of practices that are corporate, that are public, that are things that we do together.
In fact, if you remember, just a few weeks ago Brad preached a whole sermon from Hebrews 10 on the importance of meeting together and of stirring one another up to love and to good deeds. That’s also a spiritual practice. These are spiritual practices related to community and related to the church. For a balanced Christian life, we need all of those. We need the private ones and we need the public ones. But this series is particularly focused on these private spiritual practices, which I think most of us struggle to practice and observe in our lives because of the pace of life and the busyness and the distraction and all the rest. So we need a particular focus on these.
The third thing to say is that these practices that we’re looking at right now in these last few weeks should not be thought of as so distinct from one another that you need separate time slots for each one. So it’s not that you have thirty minutes a day for meditation and then another thirty minutes where you’re doing recollection and then another time slot for contemplation. Instead, these should be viewed as practices that really bleed into one another, that are interdependent, and that intersect with one another. They’re something like distinct points of focus in our personal relationship with God and in our devotional practices. So we focus on the word of God—that’s meditation. We focus on our own hearts and souls—that’s recollection. Then we focus our hearts upon God himself, and that’s what we’re calling contemplation this morning.
I want to ground this in two passages of Scripture. We’re going to be in Psalm 27:4, one verse from that psalm, then Psalm 63:1-8. I’m going to read those two passages of Scripture, and then we’re going to ask what, why, and how about contemplation.
So, Psalm 27:4 says, “One thing I asked from the Lord; this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”
Then Psalm 63:1-8:
“You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you,
my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
“I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
“On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me.”
This is God’s word.
This is a simple outline. This is one of my what, why, and how messages. I just want to ask:
1. What Is Contemplation?
2. Why Do We Need It?
3. How Do We Practice It?
I think these two psalms—and we’ll view a couple of other passage as well—help us to answer those questions.
1. What Is Contemplation?
Let me give you a simple definition first, and then kind of fill out the concept of contemplation. The simple definition is this: “Contemplation is the gaze of the soul on the beauty and glory of God.” That’s what it is.
You see that language in this passage in Psalm 27. His one desire, the one thing he seeks, is to gaze on the beauty of the Lord. It’s the gaze of the soul. It’s seeing the glory and the beauty of God with the eyes of faith.
David then reflects on his past experience of this in Psalm 63:2, when he says, “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory.” He’s using the same vocabulary as you see in Psalm 27. It is seeing with the eyes of the heart; it’s gazing on the glory, the beauty, the character of God. That’s what contemplation is.
But I want us to fill this out by trying to understand something about the concept of contemplation, especially as it’s developed in Christian spirituality, and then give you a more comprehensive definition, and then also raise and answer an objection to the practice of contemplation.
(1) Here’s the concept. I want to give you three pairs of words. First of all, “active and contemplative.” In Christian spirituality, there has now been for hundreds of years a distinction between the active life and the contemplative life, or the active and the contemplative dimensions to the Christian life. These two things have been epitomized in the characters Martha and Mary, respectively, from that famous passage in Luke 10. I mentioned this last week.
Martha is busy serving Jesus, preparing the meal, serving in the kitchen, and she’s agitated because Mary is not helping, because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. And you remember what Jesus says? He says, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the better part, and it will not be taken from her.” Martha has been seen as the active Christian and Mary as the contemplative Christian.
Now, in the best formulations, theologians and spiritual writers have said that we actually need both of these things. These are two dimensions to the Christian life that are needed. We all need to be active in service, and we also all need to have this contemplative, communion relationship with Jesus Christ. These two things are not in contrast to one another, they actually go hand in hand. But today, as we talk about the practice of contemplation, we’re really leaning into that contemplative dimension of the Christian life.
Here’s the second pair of words: “revelation and response.” This is important because all engagement with God must be understood as our response to God’s revelation of himself. In other words, contemplation is not a works-based attempt to earn favor with God or to transcend our human limitations, to merge with God in some kind of panentheistic way. It is, rather, the response of the human soul to the divine initiative. God has revealed himself to us. He’s revealed himself to us in creation and in redemption. He’s revealed himself to us through his word and through his Spirit. Contemplation is really just our response to that revelation, as we gaze upon God as he has revealed himself in these ways to us.
The third pair of words is “posture and practice,” because contemplation must be understood as both a posture of the heart that should always be attentive to the presence of God, but also as an attentiveness that is embodied in a concrete practice of focused attention on God.
The Scriptures tells us to pray without ceasing and to be always praying. At least part of what that means is that we continue to maintain a spirit of prayer and a posture of prayer, a posture of openness to God. We’re not shutting ourselves off from God through sin or through being overly distracted. We’re not allowing ourselves to be completely drawn off from awareness of God’s presence and God’s activity in our lives.
But listen, you can’t develop that unless there is a focused, concrete practice where you are actually attending upon God. That’s what contemplation is.
(2) Let’s fill out the definition. I’ve given you a simple definition that I think works for us and is biblical, but let me fill it out with a couple of examples here that give us a little more content, a little more theological grounding. This is from a man named Tom Schwanda, who for many years taught at Wheaton and has done a lot of wonderful writing on contemplation. He says, “Contemplation is both an attitude and activity of loving, focused attention or grateful gazing on God that provides a means for keeping company with and enjoying Jesus Christ.”
That’s a really good definition. It comes from a wonderful book I recommend, Embracing Contemplation: Reclaiming a Christian Spiritual Practice.
You may be more familiar with Richard Foster. Richard Foster has written a lot on spiritual practices, and he says, “Put simply, the contemplative life is the steady gaze of the soul upon the God who loves us.” Again, you have this language of gazing upon God. That’s the essential concept.
Here’s one more. This is Ryan Brandt. He says, “Contemplation is captivated attention to the triune God. It consists of a gospel-centered gazing upon and enjoying, and it culminates in transformation, the experience of love and spiritual rest and peace in communion with Christ.” I like that definition because he brings in this gospel-centric language that is so much a part of our own theological stream.
The most simple definition is this: “Contemplation is the gaze of the soul on the beauty and the glory of God.”
(3) Now, some of you might have some of a reaction to this language. You might have an objection that goes something like this: “Isn’t this New Age spirituality? or just a Roman Catholic thing? You’re talking about contemplation, you’re talking about the contemplative life and spiritual formation and spiritual disciplines—isn’t this like a New Age thing that’s invaded the church, or isn’t this just a Roman Catholic thing?”
That is a common objection. There are even books that spell this out and certainly blogs and websites and so on that accuse evangelicals who are using these kinds of spiritual practices of essentially importing a New Age mysticism into the church or simply a recourse to Roman Catholic spirituality.
But the answer to that objection is that contemplation, as you define this way, gazing upon the triune God, is both biblical—here are some of the passages, and there are many more: Psalm 27:4, Psalm 63:2, 2 Corinthians 3:18—and a practice embraced in historic Reformed evangelical spirituality.
Now, to be sure, this language is used in other forms in spirituality, and so we have to be discerning. There’s no doubt about that. But other forms of spirituality talk about God and talk about Jesus and talk about Christ and talk about the resurrection as well. We don’t reject a word because it’s misused; instead, we want to reclaim the biblical meaning of that word and the biblical meaning of this practice so that we utilize it in a biblical way.
I want to defend for a moment that this is a part of our stream. This is a part of historic Reformed evangelical spirituality. I could give you so many examples, and believe it or not, I’m restraining myself a little bit. There are a lot of quotes this morning. I’m not going to give you everything, but we could look to John Calvin, we could look to Richard Baxter the Puritan. We could look to one of my favorites, Isaac Ambrose, who was a Puritan who withdrew into the woods for a month every year and he wrote an 800-page book called Looking unto Jesus, and the whole book is just meditation and contemplation, as he spells out what he calls the gospel art of looking to Jesus. We could look at John Wesley. There are so many figures within our own tradition that we can look at, but let me just give you two examples, and these are guys that I quote all the time.
The Puritan John Owen—Owen said this: “Let us live in the constant contemplation of the glory of Christ, and virtue will proceed from him to repair all our decays, to renew a right spirit within us, and to cause us to abound in all duties of obedience.”
There it is. There’s the language of contemplation. There are at least two or three full books where Owen develops this and fleshes out what this is. You have his meditations on the glory of Christ. You have his treatment of communion with God, where he looks at distinctive communion with each person in the Trinity, distinct communion and fellowship with the Father, with the Son, and with the Spirit. Then you have his book called The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded, which is all about how to set your mind on the things of the Spirit.
All of those books are dealing with these practices of meditation and contemplation and prayer and so on.
Here’s another example. This is a longer one. This is Spurgeon. This is a quote from a sermon of Spurgeon’s that I read maybe six weeks ago. I’m slowly trying to work my way through Spurgeon’s sermons; I’m in volume 8 of 63. I’m probably never going to get through all these. But this is the best thing I’ve read from Spurgeon, I think, in the last year. It’s sermon number 455; he numbered his sermons. Sermon number 455 was called “The Love of Jesus, What It Is None but His Loved Ones Know,” which is a line from an old hymn.
He’s talking about how we experience the love of Christ, and he imagines a ladder with rungs on the ladder, and each rung is a step up. So the first rung on the ladder is what he calls the doctrinal method, when you experience the love of Christ in that way. Then he talks about gratitude for experiences of his love and thankfulness to God. He talks about obedience as a rung on the ladder.
Then he says this. This is the fourth rung. He says,
“There is a way, not known to many moderns but much practiced by the ancients, of knowing the love of Christ by contemplation. Do you know that in the early ages of the church they spoke more of Christ and of his person and thought more of him than we do? They found time to have long seasons of contemplation, and they would sit alone and worship and draw near to Christ and steadily fix their gaze upon his person.”
There it is. There’s the language again.
“For to them he was a real person whom the eye of their faith could see as clearly as the eye of sense can see outward objects, and they looked and looked and looked again, till the love of Christ grew brighter to them than the sun at his meridian, and for very dimness of mortal sight they veiled their faces and paused their speech, while their souls were bathed in inward joy and peace unspeakable.”
That’s a beautiful statement of contemplation, and I hope somewhat inviting to you, but more to this point, showing you that this language is our language. This belongs within our tradition. So we’re not importing something from another religion, we’re not importing New Age spirituality, we’re not even looking merely at what Roman Catholic mystics said, although there’s some measured benefit that we can draw from them. We’re looking particularly at what evangelicals and Reformed historical writers on spirituality have called us to, grounding it in the Scriptures, such as passages as these, Psalm 27 and Psalm 63.
That’s what it is. That’s a lengthy answer to the first question.
2. Why Do We Need It?
A little more briefly, the second question: why do we need it? Why do we need to do this? Because I am suggesting that this is something a little bit more than just reading your Bible and praying. There’s a little more to it than that. There’s something distinctive about this particular aspect of the spiritual life. But why? Why do we need this? Let me give you three reasons.
(1) First of all, transformation. I really do believe that the Scriptures teach that this practice in particular is a key to spiritual transformation. Here’s the passage, 2 Corinthians 3:18. Paul is writing, and he says, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
Do you see the connection there? He says it’s as we contemplate the glory of the Lord that the Spirit of the Lord is transforming us, is changing us.
The Greek word there is the word for metamorphosis. It’s this change from the inside out that happens to us as we become more and more like Jesus. How does it happen? It happens as you contemplate the glory of the Lord. If you’re reading the King James Version, I think it says “behold” the glory of the Lord, or the ESV it’s “beholding” the glory of the Lord.
So you could call it that. You could call this the spiritual discipline of beholding. But generally, this whole concept is called contemplation.
Now, there is a writer that many of you have heard of, a man who became a monk—not a priest, but he was a monk. He was really a cook in a monastery, and he wrote a series of letters that after he died were published, and they were called The Practice of the Presence of God. This man was Brother Lawrence, or Lawrence of the Resurrection. That was the name that he took. I’ve recently been rereading this, because I ran into Lyndon Azcuna a few days ago and he told me he was reading a modern English version of this book, so he sent it to me, and I’ve started listening to it on Audible and then started reading it, and it’s actually very helpful. I hadn’t read this in probably twenty years. There’s a lot of wisdom in this book.
There’s a beautiful image that Brother Lawrence uses about how this life of practicing the presence of God leads to transformation. He says, “Sometimes I consider myself as a stone before a sculptor who is making a statue. I present myself to God and I desire him to make his perfect image in my soul and make me entirely like himself.”
What a beautiful concept! That’s what we do when we practice contemplation. Here’s one of the key reasons to do it. If you feel stuck in your spiritual life, if you feel like you’re not advancing in Christlikeness, if you find yourself wrestling with a deeply-embedded sin or some other form of brokenness in your life and you want to change, but you know the Bible, you’ve read the Bible plenty, but you haven’t found the breakthrough yet, this may be the missing piece. It’s learning to gaze on the glory and the beauty of the Lord in such a way that the Spirit then begins to conform you to that image, the image of Christ. Transformation.
John Piper puts it this way: “Beholding is the key to becoming.” It’s as you behold his glory that you become more like him.
(2) Here’s the second reason we need this: for satisfaction. Not only for transformation, but for satisfaction. Again, this whole series is called “The Way of Life,” and what we’re after here is the good life as Jesus understands it—the rich and satisfying life, abundant life, fullness of joy. That’s possible for us as Christians. Why don’t we live up to that? Why don’t we experience that in the kind of fullness that the Scriptures seem to hold out for us? It’s because we need these kinds of practices in our lives.
You see the satisfaction here in Psalm 63:3-5. He says,
“Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.”
Here’s someone who is consumed with a deep desire for God because he has found life with God so satisfying. It is so deeply satisfying that he finds himself beckoned into this relationship with God. It’s a life of joy and of peace and of satisfaction, a rich and satisfying life. And it doesn’t come only through knowing the right doctrine, it comes through a deep experience of the very presence of God.
Here’s Brother Lawrence again. He said, “There is no sweeter and more delightful than that of continual communion with God. Only those who experience this and practice it can comprehend it.”
Listen, one of my aims in this whole series is to paint a picture of this life that is inviting enough that you feel drawn into it, so that there’s something in you that wants this, so there’s something in you that wants more than a temporal and a passing satisfaction that you can get through entertainment, you can get from the dopamine buzz as you scroll through social media, you can get in a myriad of ways; but there’s something deeper than that. There’s a deeper kind of joy. There’s a satisfaction like this, but it comes through this engagement with God through contemplation.
(3) So, transformation, satisfaction; here’s a third reason we need this: preparation. I’ll be brief on this. It’s preparation for what theologians have called the “beatific vision.” What is the beatific vision? It is that vision of the glory of God that brings supreme beatitude or bliss or happiness. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
Theologians have drawn a connection between the practice of contemplation and the experience of the beatific vision then, in glory. When we’re glorified, when we behold the face of God, I think we behold the face of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That will be the supreme moment, the eternal, unending moment of never-ending joy and bliss and satisfaction in God. That’s what you’re made for.
It was Tozer who said, “We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God.” You’re made for that. But if you’re made for that, are you experiencing that in any measure now? I mean, this is what we’re destined for, but are you experiencing any of that now? Where sometimes you just pull away from everything else and your soul gazes on God so that you feel a deep satisfaction in your heart? The practice of contemplation prepares us for the beatific vision.
3. How Do We Practice It?
How, then, do we practice contemplation? That’s the final question. How do we do this? If it’s a little bit more than just Bible reading and saying your prayers, what is it and how do you do it? I want to give you six things that I think belong to this. These are six things that we see in the passage or these two passages. I think if you put these together you get an idea and understanding of what is involved in contemplation.
(1) Number one, desire. First of all, you just have to have a desire to do this. This is what you see in both of these psalms. You see the psalmist driven by a desire that leads him to this.
Psalm 27:4: “One thing I ask from the Lord; this only do I seek.” Some versions say, “One thing have I desired from the Lord.” “This only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to dwell in his temple,” or seek him in his temple. But he desires this! He wants this! This is not being compelled from without by a sense of moral obligation and duty. There’s rather a deep delight, an attraction, an irresistible attraction that compels the person from within so that they’re seeking after God.
You see the same thing in Psalm 63. Look at verse 1. “Oh God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you. I thirst for you; my whole being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water.”
That language is so suggestive, because here’s David, and he’s writing this in the wilderness of Judea, we see from the superscription. He’s writing it from the wilderness of Judea, and he observes the surroundings in which he dwells and he says, “My soul is like this. It’s a parched land. It is a desert land, and there’s no satisfaction anywhere else. There’s nothing else that will satisfy my thirst.”
That’s the point that I think we have to come to. We have to come to the point where social media and Netflix and pornography and binge-eating or binge-drinking or binge-shopping or anything else—it’s not enough! It won’t satisfy the deep cravings of your heart. Addictive behaviors don’t satisfy the deep cravings of our hearts. You need something more. You have to come to a point where you say, “Nothing else is going to satisfy my soul. I need God. I need to know God. I need to be with God and live in the very presence of God.”
This is what happened to Jonathan Edwards. Something happened to him in his early Christian experience that shaped the rest of his life. Here’s an Edwards scholar, Michael McClemond, writing on Edwards. He says, “Edwards was not so much compelled by moral obligation as drawn by divine beauty. Very early on he had a glimpse of something so beautiful that he chose to spend the rest of his life exploring it.” And it all starts with this.
Listen, if you don’t have a desire for this, I can’t do much to help you. This series isn’t going to do much to help you if you don’t have a desire for it. You have to have a desire for it.
Where does that desire come from? Here’s the good news: that desire comes from God himself. God creates that desire, and if you find in your heart a longing like this, that is an indication that God is at work, that God is stirring something in you. We desire him because he first desired us. We love him because he first loved us. God takes the initiative. Our practices are just a response to him revealing himself to us. But this has to happen to you. You have to be born of the Spirit to want this and to pursue this. That’s first. There has to be a desire.
(2) Number two, there also has to be an intention. You have to do something with the desire. It’s possible to have that desire, to feel stabs of longing here and there but then not do anything with it. You don’t act on it. You don’t organize your life or your schedule around it. But it will require intention on your part.
“One thing I ask from the Lord; this only do I seek.” That is the psalmist making this a priority. “Oh God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you.” And the Hebrews word “earnestly” is a word that carries the idea of the dawn of the morning. It’s showing the deep intentionality in his life, that he is prioritizing time with God over everything else in his life.
Here’s Brother Lawrence again. He said, “How can we pray to him without being with him? How can we be with him unless we think of him often? And how can we think of him often unless we make this a holy habit? This is the best and easiest method I know. I use no other, and therefore I advise everyone in the world to do it.”
It’s beautiful. So simple. And I commend this book. If you find yourself in a kind of daily life where your work is so demanding that it’s hard even to carve out time with God, much less to keep God on your mind all the time, Brother Lawrence will help you. Here’s someone who had his times for prayer, but he learned to cultivate the presence of God so that even when he was cooking and cleaning and washing dishes and doing all other kinds of things he was attentive to God’s presence with him. This is what we need to learn.
But it will take intention. It will take some discipline on your part. You have to make this a priority in your life.
(3) Number three, focus. You then have to focus your thoughts upon the Lord. The psalmist says, “On my bed I remember you; I think [or I meditate] on you through the watches of the night.” That’s Psalm 63:6. There is a focus.
I would say that we need focus in these three ways. We need, first of all, to focus our awareness on the presence of God. What I mean by this is that you have to still your heart long enough to become aware of God’s presence, not just intellectually, but also experientially. It’s one thing to say, “I know God is omnipresent; he’s present everywhere, all the time. There’s no point and space where God is not there.” You can know that and not really be consciously aware of it.
It’s another thing to become focused on the sense that “God is with me right now. The Spirit of God dwells within me at this moment. God is here. God is in this room. God is as fully present in this room as another person would be.” So focus awareness on the presence of God.
Secondly, focused attention. That is, giving God your undivided attention. You all know what it is to be in a conversation with someone—some of the wives, you’re going to think of your husbands at this moment—you’re telling your husband about your day, and he’s looking at you and he’s nodding, but you notice when his eyes glaze over and he’s starting to think about something else. You know, “He’s not really paying attention to me right now.” You can do that in your relationship with God. You can be reading, and you’re not really attending to God. Your attention is not on the Lord. We have to train our minds to focus our attention, our undivided attention on God.
Also, the focus of our affections, so that we are directing our loves and our desires towards the Lord.
(4) That leads to the next thing, adoration. This is where the affections really come alive, where there’s a posture of the heart towards God of love and worship and praise. Again, you see this in Psalm 63. “Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.” Just notice all the praise and worship language here. “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands.” For any of you Baptists in the room who wonder, “Is it biblical to raise your hands in worship?” here it is. It’s right there in the Bible. It’s okay. You can do it.
“I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods. With singing lips my mouth will praise you, because you are my help. I sing in the shadow of your wings.”
The psalmist finds something in God that is so beautiful and so glorious that it calls for more than just words, it calls for song. It calls for praise. It calls for the adoration of his heart that is expressed in some kind of tangible, physical, bodily way. There’s an adoration of the heart.
(5) Then, the fifth word is perseverance. This one’s important, because it’s hard to build this habit. It’s so easy to get pulled off point. I mean, everything I said in the second point last week…the problem of disorientation, where you’re disoriented by sin, disoriented by suffering. Distraction—constant, never-ceasing streams of information and images and media coming at us all the time. You can literally spend every waking moment of your day plugged in with noise, with something to distract you. Right? Dissipating, where addictive habits in our lives dissipate and fragment our souls. Then defensiveness, where there’s just something in us that is pushing back against the need of this and against the self-awareness that we need in our lives and the problems in our lives and the wall that we’re facing in our spiritual lives. We’re just like, “I don’t want to deal with that. I can’t deal with that right now. I just can’t think about it.” It’s a defensive posture.
All of those things will make it easy for you to just drop this. You hear one sermon, you try it for one week, and then you’re done. You’re done, and you content yourself with shallow spirituality, minimal spiritual disciplines, and a less-than-satisfying Christian life. You need perseverance. You need this holy intention and resolve, and then you need a stick-to-it-iveness, where you stick to it for a long period of time.
You see this in Psalm 63:8, where the psalmist says, “I cling to you.” That’s a very vivid verb that sometimes is used for a husband cleaving to his wife. That’s in Genesis 2. It’s used of a band of soldiers pursuing and overtaking their enemies in Joshua 20. It’s used of skin cleaving to the bones in Job 19:20, or a garment clinging to a person’s waist in Jeremiah 13:11. It’s as if David is saying, “God, I cleave to you. I’m attached to you. I’m pursuing you.” In fact, the old King James says, “My soul followeth hard after you.” It’s the whole idea of the pursuit of God.
Augustine translated it like this: “My soul has been glued on behind you.” And he said that the glue was love.
There is a needed persistence and perseverance where you come back again and again and again. This will be so important, because you’re going to have days like this, I have days like this, where you reflect on the day before and you recognize that you were only minimally aware of God. You were busy or you were tired or you were distracted. You didn’t crack open your Bible. You barely prayed. You didn’t live the day particularly well. You maybe even departed from the Lord. Your heart got hard, your heart got cold. It would be so easy to just be paralyzed and immobilized by that!
Instead, what we have to do is ask for forgiveness and pardon, and then we begin a new day, and we begin a new day with a new intention that, “Lord, today I want to set you before me. Today I want to be intentional about spending some time in your presence. Today I want to meditate on this aspect of who you are. I want to set some time apart where I think on your word. Even if it’s just ten or fifteen minutes, I’m going to seek you today. I’m going to put some discipline on my phone use, my Internet use, today.”
Maybe you didn’t do well yesterday. Okay. Maybe you didn’t do well last week. Okay. What about today? What about tomorrow? What about the next day? You continue to cling to the Lord and pursue the Lord, and you don’t give up. Perseverance in this.
(6) Then, finally, dependence. Dependence, because ultimately, this is not something you can do on your own. You have to be continually strengthened by God’s grace and filled and carried by God’s Spirit. God has to empower you to do this.
Again, you see it in this psalm. “I cling to you,” verse 8. “Your right hand upholds me.” He’s depending on the Lord! God is holding him up. You’re going to have to trust in that, that God is holding you up.
Jonathan Edwards, one more time, said, “The Spirit excites to love and makes the attributes of God as revealed in the gospel and manifested in Christ delightful objects of contemplation and makes the soul to long after God and Christ, after their presence and communion, and acquaintance with them and conformity to them, and to live so as to please and honor them.”
Who’s acting in that paragraph? It’s the Spirit! The Spirit is the one who does all this. The Spirit is the one who stirs us up to love and to desire and who carries us in the power of his grace. You have to depend on the Lord if you want to do this.
We’ve asked these questions: What is contemplation? It’s the gaze of the soul on the beauty and glory of God. Why do we need it? We need it for transformation, we need it for satisfaction, and to prepare our hearts for the beatific vision. How do you do it? Desire, intention, focus, adoration, perseverance, dependence.
Let me end in this way. First of all, have you experienced this? Maybe not every day. Maybe it’s been a while. But have you experienced this, where you have spent the kind of time in the presence of God where you were drawn to this point, gazing on God in a way that brought joy and transformation to your soul? If so, view today as a call to return to that practice and seek that experience of God and begin.
Do you desire this? Is there something in you that’s saying, “Yes, I want that”? “I do want that. I want that kind of life. I want that kind of relationship with God. I want it. Yes, Lord.”
If so, will you practice it? Will you set the intention and resolve to spend this time in seeking the Lord this week, beginning a new habit, a new spiritual practice perhaps, or renewing an old one? That will lead you into this kind of life with God. Let’s pray together.
God, we thank you this morning for your word, we thank you for the invitation of your word through psalms like this to pursue a kind of relationship with you that can bring an indescribable joy, a joy that is unspeakable and full of glory, to use the words of Peter. I trust, Lord, that there’s something in our hearts that corresponds with that, that wants that. There’s something in us right now that’s saying, “Yes, Lord. In spite of all the obstacles I see, in spite of my sins and failures, in spite of the walls and the obstacles in my life, I want this.” Lord, I pray that you would take that desire, you would take that want, and you would deepen it and you would strengthen it and that you would make it strong enough, that in the strength of your Spirit we would do something different in the way we organize time and the way we pursue you this week. Then, Lord, I pray that in the encounter, the time with you, that you would meet us in a special way so as to change us, so as to deepen our joy in you, to make us more like Jesus, and ultimately to help us honor you and praise you as the beautiful, glorious God that you are.
So we ask you, Lord, to work in our hearts that which is pleasing in your sight. We ask that you would do it by your Spirit and for the sake of your Son, Jesus. We pray, Lord, that as we come to the table you would work even now, that the table would be for us a means of grace as we come to worship you; as we take these elements, that we would receive not only the outward form of the elements but that we would receive Jesus himself as nourishment and satisfaction for our hungry souls. So draw near to us now, we pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
